Jason from MNPP here with this week's edition of "Beauty vs Beast," wherein we ask you to pick a side either side in one of cinema's many morality plays. It's the birthday of one of our greatest living actresses - Isabelle Huppert is turning 62 today! And talk about still going strong. She's pounding out some of her most exciting and dangerous-as-ever work ever these days; last year's Abuse of Weakness from Catherine Breillat made me weak in the knees. And the project she's in the middle of filming right now, a rape-revenge thriller from Danish provocateur Paul Verhoeven... well even just writing those words in that sequence makes me break out in a hot sweat of expectations.
So today in her honor we look back at perhaps her greatest achievement to date, Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher. Which - usefully for this exercise - is also giving us one of the hardest-to-root-for lead characters ever put on screen. Not that Benoit Magimel's aggresively manicured Walter is anybody's idea of a saint... Haneke's not going to make this easy for anybody. (Understatement of the century.)
PREVIOUSLY We made like Buffy for her 18th anniversary and got our vampire boyfriends on - but who slayed? It was the peroxide punk who saved the day - Spike too about 53% of the vote in what was unsurprisingly a close battle. It's been raging for eighteen years, after all! Said JS:
"Spike still takes every and all cakes."